“In the winter you don’t survive for six weeks lying out in the open in Canada on a mountain. It is just a fact.”

But he said he could not say with certainty his son was dead and likened the situation to a shipwreck, adding: “People are lost overboard but you don’t know for absolute certaint they have not been washed up on an island somewhere.”

The family is now facing a long wait until the mountain snow melts in June for the search for the former Cokethorpe School pupil to resume.

His father, 51, said searchers had not been able to check a dangerous area where his son could be lying.

He said: “Rather sadly they think that area, given the times when Tom was sighted, is the most likely place for him to have got to, and the most likely place to have an accident.”

Ipsoregulated

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